I'm a cosmopolitan in the "being of the world" sense and feel few ties to my country of origin. I've been in Shanghai since 2008 and am here for a few more years at least.

What I’m doing with my life

I've been working in education; first as a teacher then as as an educational consultant/tutor, and now as a teacher again. I teach psychology, and my own academic background is a mix of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. These definitely influence the ways in which I experience and interpret the world around me. I love learning and being a perpetual student and can easily feel depressed or stuck when I don't have the opportunity to learn new things. Luckily there's this thing called the internet, so I've been doing pretty okay lately.

At home I'm usually reading and writing, maybe cooking, yoga, listening to podcasts, tackling Mandarin... I need novelty and creativity as well as a constant influx of new information to chew on. I'm trying to balance the demands of actually getting out there and living life with meaningful reflection and aggregation of my experiences into substantial works, usually through writing or photography.

I’m really good at

Waking up early. Over-watering plants. Eating Indian food. Reading in front of my space heater. Making tea and forgetting about it. Riding bikes. Interiors (physical and not). Building Ikea furniture.

The first things people usually notice about me

My seriously intense resting face. I'm (usually) not as angry as I look.

Movies: Moonrise Kingdom. Stranger than Fiction. Metropolis. The Princess Bride. Chronos, Baraka, Samsara. Also notable, I did Bergman's entire filmography in the span of two weeks during a particularly bleak Shanghai winter.

Food: I really love all kinds of food...except meat (well, I love it I just don't eat it, other than during travel...then I make exceptions).

The six things I could never do without

Learning, music, language, novelty, love, movement

I spend a lot of time thinking about

The future of the nuclear family, Shanghai taxi drivers, merits of a lingua franca, what I'm going to eat next, nationalism/cosmopolitanism, interior design, the constraints and liberties of binary gender codes, intersections, gun violence in america, how much I despise evolutionary psychology, whether or not I am going to get cat(s), what I will name them, the vastness of the universe, existential philosophy.

On a typical Friday night I am

hopefully having an old fashioned with interesting conversation or at least an interesting book.

You should message me if

...you think we really have some things we can connect on and you'd like to spend a couple hours discussing those things over drinks without the expectation of sex at the end. I'm definitely not looking for a random hook-up. I've got nothing against casual sex, it's just not what I'm doing or looking for.